These new UW online courses, under the name UWashingtonX, will be free and open to the public. The courses will be in addition to the such courses already available on Coursera, where the UW was an early innovator with both free and for-credit classes, announced in July 2012.

The UW plans to start with four new courses for edX, ready in January 2014. Courses under consideration will build on the university’s online teaching expertise since the 1990s that includes: more than a dozen Massive Open Online Courses launched in 2012-13, plus 15 online graduate degrees, undergraduate online degree completion, 40 certificate programs, 58 online undergraduate courses, and 14 other free courses made available during the last decade.

In addition to Harvard and MIT, edX elite partners also include such universities as California, Berkeley; Georgetown; Toronto; Cornell; Boston and Texas, plus leading institutions in Asia, Europe and Australia. Each partner shares a commitment to transforming educational quality, efficiency and scale through technology and research for the benefit of campus-based students and the worldwide community of online and blended learners.

“The University of Washington remains committed to learning more about the impacts, reach, challenges and benefits of MOOCs,” said UW President Michael K. Young. “As a large, public research institution with a mission to increase access to education, we’ll continue to explore the forefront of educational delivery, evaluate teaching and learning effectiveness, consider trends, and drive research to improve higher education. MOOCs are part of this, and joining with edX adds to our portfolio of high-quality, free offerings for the public.”

Among institutions offering new Massive Open Online Courses the last year, the UW was the first university to provide a way for those online students to obtain credit. Many UW Coursera students are provided an option to convert from the free online courses to an enhanced, small cohort, instructor-led, UW online for-credit class that requires additional homework, assignments, evaluations, and a fee.

“The research focus and Harvard/MIT roots of edX will allow us to further our knowledge of MOOCs and their efficacy,” said David P. Szatmary, vice provost of UW Educational Outreach. “As a leader in online education, we want to help shape this important innovation and define what’s possible.”

Currently, the UW offers 14 Massive Open Online Courses on Coursera. Some are new courses, launching soon. Enrollments for representative UW courses on Coursera are listed below. Numbers reflect the top instance for each individual course to date, since some courses are repeated multiple times throughout the year:

• Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics: 30,578
• Information and Risk Management: 25,077
• *Introduction to Public Speaking: 15,929 (*growing daily; course starts June 24, 2013)
• Computational Methods for Data Analysis: 15,179
• High Performing Scientific Computing: 14,977
• Scientific Computing: 13,374
• Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit: 10,533
• Designing and Executing Information Security Strategies: 9,206

###

Student researcher discusses her work at 2012 Undergraduate Research Symposium.

In conjunction with the symposium, another 50 undergraduates from UW and nine other universities will present results from research collaborations through the McNair scholars and other such programs, May 16 to 18.

The UW Undergraduate Research Symposium provides a forum for undergraduate students to present the research, scholarly and creative work they have accomplished alongside faculty and graduate mentors throughout the academic year. Through their poster and oral presentations, undergraduates also learn to explain and connect their work to a general audience.

Students will share their research on topics such as new methods for targeted DNA sequencing, improving waste management efficiency at the UW, translating athletes’ football intelligence to classroom success, cultivating a sustainable farm at a prison, creating a low-cost paper-based test to diagnose infectious diseases such as malaria in developing countries, and producing a Native American comic book to share important information relating to cancer education, among many others.

The annual undergraduate research mentor awards, which recognize exceptional faculty and graduate student mentors to undergraduate researchers, will also be announced during the program.

The symposium is organized by Undergraduate Academic Affairs’ Undergraduate Research Program, which facilitates research experiences for students in all academic disciplines. Symposium attendees are encouraged to search the online proceedings.

The regional McNair conference, co-sponsored by the Early Identification Program for Graduate Studies and the Graduate School’s Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program, will take place at Mary Gates Hall, the HUB and also at the Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center. The 50 undergraduate scholars include 26 UW students affiliated with the McNair Scholars Program, Presidential Scholars Program, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and Initiative for Maximizing Student Development.

UW underwater robot team competes Saturday

This year’s challenges involve installing, operating and maintaining a cabled ocean observing system, similar to the one being installed by the UW this summer off the Washington and Oregon coasts.

The UW team will attempt to qualify for the international contest, as will Western Washington University and Skagit Valley’s 4H club. Middle- and high-school teams from Seattle, Tacoma, the Kitsap Peninsula and the San Juan Islands will compete and see who will advance to the next round.

The weekend event is one of 22 regional contests held in the U.S., Canada, Japan, China, Egypt and Scotland. Winners of the regional contests will advance to the 12^th annual international competition, which will take place June 20-22 in Federal Way.

Cecilia Bitz recognized for decade’s worth of work
Cecilia Bitz, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences, was awarded the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel Award. The $10,000 award honors early- to mid-career ocean scientists who have made significant and growing impacts during the previous decade.

Bitz’s research focuses on modeling climate change in snow- and ice-covered regions. She is an author on the last three assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in March she briefed U.S. Congress members on Arctic sea-ice loss. Bitz, a UW graduate with a master’s in physics and doctorate in atmospheric sciences, currently chairs the advisory board of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

Greenwald, Kuhl among 25 honored as part of 25^th anniversary

As part of Association for Psychological Science ‘s 25th anniversary celebration, the board of directors has named 25 distinguished scientists – including UW’s Anthony Greenwald and Patricia Kuhl – who have had a profound impact on the field of psychological science over the past quarter century.

Greenwald is a psychology professor and Kuhl is co-director of UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and a UW professor of speech and hearing sciences.

In announcing the awards, the association noted that Greenwald’s work with unconscious and automatic thought processes has changed “what had once been a pariah of psychological science — subliminal perception — and turned it into a respectable area of research and even a gold mine for others to excavate.”

The association wrote that Kuhl is “widely known” for research showing how babies’ ability to discriminate speech sounds becomes increasingly specific to their native language as they age and that social skills play a critical role in language learning.

Kathy Newell / UW

The R/V Barnes during a research cruise.

It’s a landmark trip for the vessel that has spent almost 30 years taking people from the UW and elsewhere out to the Sound, the Olympic Peninsula and nearby coasts to make discoveries about chemistry, currents and marine life.

All this from a boat that even its biggest fans admit has serious drawbacks.

The boat was never built to go into open seas, and adding 10 tons of scientific equipment to the stern did nothing to help with stability issues.

“It’s safe; it’s just miserable,” said Ray McQuin, the ship’s captain and supervisor. “Everyone gets seasick.”

(McQuin has a naturally strong stomach, he said, and suffers from seasickness only a couple of times each year.)

The scientists’ berths, two sets of triple bunks that hang from chains, make the undergraduate dorms seem plush by comparison. There’s only one bathroom and shower. And a 100-square-foot room serves as kitchen, dining room, common area and recreational room for up to six researchers (15 for short trips) and a two-person crew.

But most noticeable are the small scientist quarters, which were squeezed on after the fact. The small room is jam-packed during cruises with people, laptops and science equipment.

“It’s very — personal,” said Ginger Armbrust, professor and director of the UW’s School of Oceanography. Others describe it as “crowded” or even “controlled chaos.”

Still, Armbrust has fond memories. “It’s fun working on the Barnes. It’s very hands-on. You can get to your first station in five minutes, in contrast to when you’re working offshore and it takes you a day to get to your first station.”

The vessel was built in 1966 as a U.S. Coast Guard inland harbor tug that spent years towing boats, quenching fires and doing light ice-breaking out of Bellingham and Alaska.

The UW acquired the 65-foot boat at a bargain price in 1983 and converted it, replacing the original transmission with one that will go at the slower speeds needed for research, attaching a winch to lower instruments into the water, and adding a science cabin.

“It’s not a purpose-built research boat. There are a lot of compromises, but we get the job done,” McQuin said. “It’s a work boat, and that’s what we need.”

Logbooks show that in recent years, the Barnes has been out studying nitrogen near Neah Bay, algal blooms, marine food webs, effects of the Elwha Dam removal, and oxygen levels in Hood Canal.

The 1000th cruise will be a series of half-day trips May 7-9 from Shilshole Marina for Oceanography 201, an introductory lab course that lets students take oceanographic measurements.

“For oceanography majors, getting out on the water early is really important,” said instructor Susan Hautala, a UW associate professor of oceanography. “It gives students an idea of both what oceanographers do, and of why oceanography is so challenging: It’s taking limited measurements in a highly variable environment, and trying to piece together bits of evidence.”

Doug Russell / UW

A recent photo of the Barnes in dry dock. The boat will be decommissioned in 2016.

The boat’s namesake, Clifford A. Barnes, was a UW alumnus and professor of oceanography from 1947 to 1973 whose publications include “Circulation near the Washington Coast” and “An Oceanographic Model of Puget Sound.”

The millennial cruise will be one of the last for the vessel, which is nearing the end of its lifetime. The National Science Foundation will decommission the boat in 2016.

“You reach a point – and we’re getting there with this boat – where you can’t afford to keep it running. There are too many repairs,” McQuin said.

Plans are already under way to find a replacement. The School of Oceanography is looking for grants and private donations to fund a new vessel. Jensen Maritime Consultants created a custom design for an 86-foot vessel that would have more than four times as much lab space, carry twice as many people, and include modern navigation capabilities.

“The Barnes has been an incredible resource both for monitoring and understanding Puget Sound, and for giving our students an opportunity to do hands-on research, which is a core part of our program,” Armbrust said. “We’re looking forward to getting a new ship that will allow us to do this and more.”

###

For more information, contact Hautala at 206-543-0596 or susanh@ocean.washington.edu.

Each year UW undergraduates dedicate many hours in the community. In the 2011-12 school year, for example, more than 5,900 UW students devoted 556,340 hours participating in university-sponsored activities. At the celebration, students will share their experiences on behalf of environmental sustainability, unemployment law, addiction treatment methods, early literacy, healthcare and more.

Jumpstart

UW undergraduate Masooda Zarifi leads preschoolers in a science activity using flashlights, shadows and reflections.

Ric Robinson, a professor of biological structure, said such student involvement advances critical-thinking skills. Robinson mentors UW undergraduate Kayla Ritchie who publishes a quarterly student-run neuroscience journal “Grey Matters.”

“Kayla is already exhibiting and learning the day-to-day leadership and problem-solving skills necessary to make ambitious real world projects succeed,” he said.

The spring celebration is sponsored by the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center, Jumpstart, the Pipeline Project and the Mary Gates Endowment for Students. This year marks the 15^th and 10^th anniversaries respectively of the Pipeline Project and Jumpstart. The two have connected more than 12,000 undergraduates with programs for preschool and K-12 youngsters.

UW alum Gloria Johnston was one such student. As an undergraduate she devoted hundreds of hours to Jumpstart, an early literacy program that connects college students as tutors and mentors with preschool children from low-income communities.

“My Jumpstart experience was the foundation for my interest in direct service and community involvement,” she says.

The celebration will include student posters, a talk by author, educator, and civic entrepreneur Eric Liu about  the impact of student service on our community and recognition of  this year’s Edward E. Carlson Leadership Awardee, Yuriana Garcia, for her efforts to educate undocumented students about options to pay for college.

After the program, and for the first time, more than 40 student presenters will share their stories in small “breakout sessions.”

May is bike to campus month

Math at top speed: Exploding drag racing myths
Elementary mathematical frameworks for studying old and new drag racing beliefs – validating some and debunking others – is the subject of this quarter’s MathAcrossCampus lecture, 3:30-4:30 p.m. Friday, May 3, in 220 Kane Hall. Richard Tapia, mathematician at Rice University, will include a historical account of the development of drag racing with videos and pictures depicting his involvement in the early days of the sport. A reception follows the talk.

UW recognized for campus tree management
For the third year in a row, the UW is on the Tree Campus USA list in recognition of excellence in campus tree management by the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit with more than a million members. The university achieved the title by maintaining a tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicated annual expenditures toward trees, an Arbor Day observance and student service-learning projects.

Instead, 65 advisers representing 33 degree-granting departments and programs volunteered (representing about half of all undergraduate programs) and since fall quarter they have interviewed more than 1,000 graduating seniors.

Vince Stricherz

A student works on a computer while enjoying a sunny afternoon on the UW Quad.

Beyer, research scientist with the Office of Educational Assessment, conceived the UW Academic Challenge and Engagement Study as fulfilling three purposes: gathering information about how undergraduate programs are challenging students, giving students a chance to reflect on their learning and engaging advisers in the assessment process.

Beyer said the project is unique among the UW’s peer institutions.

“The fact that so many advisers volunteered to participate says a lot about how people here care about students’ learning,” she said.

Advisers received training from Beyer and Jon Peterson in educational assessment, after which they posed these questions to graduating seniors:

• What is the most challenging work you’ve done in your major?
• What made it challenging?
• What did you learn to do to meet that challenge and how did you learn it?
• What did you learn by meeting that challenge?

Results thus far seem to affirm the approaches taken in many majors.

“Our students are generally really happy with what they do in biology,” said Janet Germeraad, biology’s director of academic services.  “They are engaged in the challenges of our upper-division course work.”

“I’ve learned so much about the courses we offer,” said Elizabeth Copland, academic adviser in the School of Art. “It is clear that our students are gaining skills that will serve them in any career. Hearing about projects, papers and critiques … has made me a better adviser.”

“I was surprised at how accomplished our students are and how self-reflective and articulate they are about their educational experiences,” said Megan Styles, program coordinator and undergraduate academic adviser in Slavic languages and literatures. “We have some exceptional faculty who form strong connections with the students, and I think this feedback will help motivate them to continue putting the time and energy that they do into their teaching.”

Rick Roth, director of advising and instructional services in geography, found that his students responded strongly when confronted with an “open-ended moment, when they are forced to exercise some judgment about what ‘next step’ to take.”

For some students, challenging classes are providing a gateway to greater self-knowledge.  A psychology major, in commenting on the impact of a project, wrote: “Previously, I considered myself to be a not-scientific person – more an English major. Doing the project helps me understand [how to] read research – how it is set up and what sections to even skip when I read an article. I learned that research can actually be fun!”

Although Beyer says she was surprised and delighted by the degree of participation from advisers, for most of them this just goes with their role in the educational process. Said Roth, “I love to talk with students about their learning, partly because this is one subject in which they, not faculty, are the experts.”

###

Wash. Labor & Industries

The brass bell in the Workers Memorial Garden on the grounds of the Washington State Labor and Industries offices.

The Workers Memorial Day ceremony is being organized by the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health in the School of Public Health, UW Environmental Health and Safety, UW students, local union leaders, and the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. The organizers are active in raising awareness and strengthening commitment to job safety and healthy work environments for Washington workers.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 was signed into federal law to protect employees from workplace hazards. Yet, according to the event organizers, more effort is needed to keep American workers safe from preventable, job-related injuries, disease and death.

Workers Memorial Day recognizes fallen workers and calls attention to workplace safety issues

They note that in 2010, nationwide 4,547 workers were killed on the job, and another 5,000 lost their lives to occupation diseases.  For that same year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 3.1 million job injuries and illnesses among private-sector employees and 820,000 injuries and illnesses among public employees. The organizers added that, due to underreporting, these numbers might understate the problem.

Ten of those whose lives will be remembered April 24 were from King County, Wash. Among them were firefighters, home-care aides, laborers, longshoremen, park rangers, sales clerks, and taxi drivers. The names of the fallen workers will be read during the UW ceremony.

Nationally and internationally Workers Memorial Day is commemorated April 28, with events also held in the days leading up to the official date.  It was started by the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1984, and recognized in the United States beginning in 1989.

The program for the April 24 UW ceremony:

Presentation of Colors
University of Washington Air Force ROTC Honor Guard
Karl Zapf, Bagpiper
Seattle Firefighters Pipes and Drums

Master of Ceremonies
David Freiboth, executive secretary, King County Labor Council

Keynote Address
The Importance of Workers’ Rights and Safety: A Call to Action
Michael Honey, professor of ethnic gender and labor studies, UW Tacoma

Memorial Recognition
Karen Hart, President SEIU 925
Our Fallen Workers – 2012
Names read by UW students, staff, and faculty, and community members
Our Fallen Workers Serving in the Armed Services – 2012
Names read by Cadet Justin Rees

A Message from Sen. Patty Murray

Moving Forward
Jeff Johnson, president, Washington State Labor Council
Marty Cohen, UW Field Research and Consultation Group
Megan Karalua, UAW Local 4121
Emily Garverick, UW United Students Against Sweatshops
Dow Constantine, King County Executive

Closing
Music by Michael Laslett and Mike Honey

]]> http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/23/workers-memorial-day-event-takes-place-april-24-at-hub-lyceum/feed/ 0 http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/18/huskyfest-earth-day-activities-fill-red-square-friday/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=huskyfest-earth-day-activities-fill-red-square-friday http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/18/huskyfest-earth-day-activities-fill-red-square-friday/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:47:56 +0000 Sandra Hines http://www.washington.edu/news/?p=24307 Head to Red Square Friday (April 19) for donuts first thing in the morning and music beginning at 7:30 a.m., as the second annual HuskyFest gets underway. Then kick-off activities for Earth Day starting at 10 a.m.

While supplies last, there’s free coffee and doughnuts from Top Pot Doughnuts at 6 a.m., a HuskyFest T-shirt giveaway at 11:30 a.m. and free ice cream from Cupcake Royale at 12:30 p.m.

KEXP Radio will broadcast live starting at 6 a.m. and has lined up six bands from the Puget Sound area for performances throughout the day, starting at 7:30 a.m. with Jon Russell, Damien Jurado and Tomo Nakayama.

HuskyFest offers additional activities in Red Square and several venues across campus all day.

Highlights of the kick-off for Earth Day include talks by local people tackling major environmental challenges in the greater Seattle community and a “trashion show,” according to Max Sugarman, UW Earth Day coordinator and member of the UW Earth Club that collaboratin with the Office of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability on this year’s events.

U of Washington

Participants in the 2012 trashion show parade their creations.

Anne Mosness, a fishing boat captain and adviser to the Go Wild Campaign, and James Rasmussen, a member of the Duwamish Tribe and coordinator of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, will speak in Red Square at noon following opening remarks by Julia Parrish, associate dean of the College of the Environment.

Outfits in the trashion show at 2:15 p.m. are made with materials from personal trash and commercial dumpsters, last year including such things as University Bookstore bags and aluminum cans. KING TV’s New Day Northwest previewed this year’s show.

Among other activities Friday there will be more than 35 booths from vendors and campus groups on Red Square, the awarding of the annual Husky Green Awards and a chance to volunteer to plant, weed and mulch at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture and remove invasive species from the nearby Union Bay Natural Area. Work party registration is at 12:30 p.m.

A week of Earth Day activities follow Friday’s kick-off. Sugarman said some highlights are:

• A restoration event at McCarty Hall with the Society for Ecological Restoration and the Campus Sustainability Fund on Monday, April 22, the traditional Earth Day.
• A trash-in with UW Recycling and UW Earth Club, Wednesday, April 24.
• A climate change speaker panel (Facebook RSVP) hosted by the Student Association for Green Environments, Thursday, April 25.

A University of Washington class is using the nation’s first controlled-ocean research tool to study the effects of increased acidity on marine ecosystems.

“The goal is to study the impact of ocean acidification on biological community structure in seawater from the San Juan Islands,” said James Murray, a UW oceanography professor.

On the main dock at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories until April 29 the team will start at 8:30 each morning by lowering bottles six feet (two meters) into each reservoir to collect water samples. Students enrolled in a research apprenticeship class then analyze the seawater to see how acidity affects chemistry, bacterial communities, and marine animal and plant life.

“The biological impacts of ocean acidification are the big unknowns,” Murray said. “We know that CO₂ is going up, and we know that the oceans are going to be more acidic, but what we don’t know, and everyone is concerned about, is the possible impact on the biology.”

Jim Murray / UW

The nine test tanks, on the left, attach to the main dock at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island.

Murray led development of the experimental facility over the past five years with funding from the Educational Foundation of America and the National Science Foundation. In recent years the group has worked out some tweaks – adding floats to each reservoir to keep from straining the dock, and shading the covers to slow down biological blooms in the reservoirs.

This is the first spring that the reservoirs will be used to carry out experiments, launched April 9, to simulate more acidic oceans. Four faculty members, four technicians and two teaching assistants will help the students perform chemical tests, conduct microscope analyses and do simple genetic tests of biological diversity on the seawater.

The reservoirs, called mesocosms, are water enclosures that provide a controllable section of the natural ocean. They allow researchers to conduct studies that are midway between a controlled lab test and an open-ocean experiment.

Jim Murray / UW

Students prepare the frames for the April 9 start of the experiment.

The Friday Harbor structures are 18-foot-tall plastic bags that hang from metal rings. For two days seawater near the dock was coarsely filtered to remove jellyfish and other large pieces of marine life before gradually filling the bags. Each bag holds 3,000 liters (790 gallons), enough water to fill more than 35 bathtubs. Three of the bags stay at the natural acidity, the other six have carbon dioxide pumped inside to increase acidity to the levels projected under climate change.

“This experiment is a way to look at all interactions between the components of the food web, including some of the more complex biological interactions that happen in the real ocean,” Murray said.

The acrylic domes are actually loose covers that prevent seagulls or other debris from landing in the tank.

The UW aquatic mesocosm was modeled after similar structures to study ocean acidification in Bergen, Norway, and Pohang, South Korea. Researchers from both countries are also involved in the experiments this spring at the Friday Harbor facility.

Korean scientists are interested in dimethyl sulfide, the chemical that helps give ocean air its characteristic smell. The concentrations of this gas may differ under climate change, and some scientists believe it plays a role in cloud formation.

“This year’s experiment has gone really smoothly so far, and I think we’re on track to have some interesting results,” Murray said.

###

For more information, contact Murray in Friday Harbor at 206-251-5220 or jmurray@uw.edu. Sampling will take place on the dock each day from 8:30-10 a.m. Visitors are welcome.

UW Burke Museum/High Country Apps

The wildflower app splash page that appears as the application is loading.

The app for iOS, Android and Kindle mobile devices – complete with images, species names , range maps, bloom period and technical descriptions – was produced by the University of Washington Herbarium at the Burke Museum and the two authors of “Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest” with High Country Apps, a Montana-based company that creates mobile wilderness guides.

Designed for both budding wildflower enthusiasts and experienced experts, the app is for individuals who travel to wildflower areas and are interested in knowing the names and natural history of the plants they encounter. It’s primarily meant to be a plant identification tool, but it also provides educational information about ecological regions, plant communities and botanical terms.

The majority of species included are native, but introduced species common to the region are covered as well in order to expand the usefulness of the resource. Once downloaded, the app does not need an internet or network connection to run so you can use it no matter how remote your wanderings.

A free introductory version of the app that features 32 Washington wildflowers is available at stores and online outlets selling the full, 870-plant app for $7.99. A portion of revenues from the app supports conservation and botanical exploration in the region.

UW Burke Museum/High Country Apps

There are nine ways to search for the identity of wildflowers including the four shown here.

“The number of species covered and wealth of information included sets a new standard for wildflower identification apps,” said David Giblin, collections manager of the herbarium.

Users can browse the species list by common or scientific name, or by family, to locate a plant and access the related information. However, most users will likely use the identification key that is the core of the app. Giblin and herbarium informatics specialist Ben Legler provided the technical data for the key including the scientific names, species distribution, whether each plant is native or an introduced, time of bloom and more.

The tool was inspired by the Burke Museum’s Plants of Washington Image Gallery, a comprehensive online image collection of the state’s plants and lichens.

Phil Borges

Tibet Portrait by photographer Phil Borges, whose work will be shown during UW Global Health Week.

A Community Cafe will take place from 6:30-8:30 p.m., Monday, April 15 in Parnassus Café. The event  will feature ACT Theatre performances, including a reading from “Middletown.” The play touches on themes of mental health and depression.

A visual arts exhibit will showcase work from several local artists. Among them are Ellen Garvens, a UW photography professor whose pictures capture the people who make and use prosthetics in Indonesia; John Blalock, a student in a masters of fine arts program and  an artist-in-residence at Seattle Children’s:  Phil Borges, a social documentary photographer;  and Consuelo Echeverria, a global health graduate student and artist.

A theater banner for the play “Middletown.”

Later in the week, the UW’s Global Health Resource Center will host a Global Health and the Arts Symposium with local artists. The symposium will be held from noon to 6 p.m., Saturday, April 20 in Foege Auditorium, located in the UW Foege Building

Kevin Shaw, a UW undergraduate minor in global health and one the event organizers, said beauty and aesthetics is important for human health, but is often lost in contemporary discourse.

Ellen Garven

Ellen Garven’s photo of a prosthetic leg being made in Indonesia.

“We need to explore what makes humans healthy and what makes them thrive in the absence of disease. That’s communities,” he said.  “Art builds communities and builds complete people. There is so much potential for people in the arts to make a difference in public health.”

The symposium will include three panels and several performances, including the Seattle Fandango Project, which brings people together through music, dance, and verse.

A dozen guest speakers are lined up. They include Borges, known for his work with indigenous communities; Jacque Larrainzar, policy director for the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, who helped organize a queer feminist collective in Mexico; Carlo Scandiuzzi, director of ACT Theatre in Seattle; and several students and faculty working at the intersection of the arts and global health, including Sutapu Basu, director of the UW Women’s Center, whose dramas address worldwide women’s health issues, particularly human trafficking.

The panels will explore existing partnerships and the possibilities of additional collaboration between art and global health. There also will be discussions on how art can advance women’s health.

The symposium will feature 10-minute live performances. Film clips from UCLA’s Art and Global Health Center also will be shown, including a project in which HIV-positive people document their lives.

Daren Wade, director of the Global Health Resource Center within the Department of Global Health, said reaching out to the arts community is long overdue.

“As a global health resource center, our charge is to intersect with all parts of campus and throughout the years, we have touched most of campus,” he said. “But we and the campus as a whole need to reach out more to the creative arts. This is how to connect best with the community.”

To find out more about Global Health Week and the Global Health and the Arts Symposium, please go to:
http://globalhealth.washington.edu/global-health-career-week-2013.

Built “ecologies,” resource integration subject of lecture April 4

The lecture from 6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, April 4, in Kane 210 is free and open to the public, but advanced registration is requested.

Speaking on the subject of “Built Ecologies: Regionalism and Resource Integration in the Built World” will be Thomas Knittel, vice president and project designer with HOK, a design, architecture, engineering and planning firm with offices in Seattle and 23 other cities.

Drawing on research and project examples from Brazil and Haiti to China, he will discuss how new design strategies and solutions, to be more resilient, must be integrated with sustainably produced regional resources—and how design informed by nature provides insights, from the nano to the macro, toward building a sustainable future locally and globally.

UW wins sixth consecutive regional cybersecurity competition
The University of Washington has won the 2013 Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, extending its undefeated streak to all six years of the competition.

In competition March 23-24 at Highline Community College, teams of students defended a fictional computer network against attacks conducted by security industry professionals. The event helps students develop teamwork and project management skills and is part of the curriculum for the UW’s Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.

A dozen teams competed this year, including one from UW Bothell, which finished in fourth place. Students on the UW Seattle team were from the Informatics Program at the UW Information School and the Computer Science and Engineering Department. The national competition will be April 19-21 in San Antonio, Texas.

2013 Autism Awareness Month: Public events in Seattle and Tacoma
The UW Autism Center will host a series of public lectures throughout April, which is Autism Awareness Month. The free lectures, to be held in Seattle and Tacoma, include:

• “Making Friends: Supporting Peer Interactions for Students with ASD,” April 3 in Tacoma
• “Ask the Experts: A Multidisciplinary Panel Discussion,” April 4 in Seattle
• “Off to College? The Needs of Students with ASD after High School,” April 16 in Tacoma
• “All I Really Need is an iPad, Right? Myths and Realities of iPads for Families of Individuals with ASD,” April 18 in Seattle and April 30 in Tacoma
• “Get your Zzzzzz’s! Strategies for Addressing Sleep Problems in Children and Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum,” April 25 in Seattle

More lectures are on the full schedule, along with the times and locations. To register, call 1-877-408-UWAC or email uwautism@uw.edu.

The partnership slate for UW Medicine Health.

UW Medicine will launch a multi-media initiative April 1 to provide consumers with health and wellness information. In partnership with Fisher Communications, UW Medicine also will increase awareness of the latest treatments and medical breakthroughs at UW Medicine.

“In support of our mission to improve the health of the public, UW Medicine recognizes the need to encourage each member of our community to take responsibility for their personal health,” said Dr. Paul G. Ramsey, CEO of UW Medicine. “With this initiative, our audiences will gain valuable knowledge and tools for engaging in preventive care and establishing rewarding personal health behaviors.”

KOMO broadcast reporter Molly Shen will introduce the UW Medicine Health series.

“The new initiative is part of UW Medicine’s overall strategy to provide comprehensive care for our community,” said Johnese Spisso, UW Medicine’s chief health system officer. “It will highlight UW Medicine’s expertise in a broad range of primary care and specialty fields while helping consumers make informed decisions about their treatment options in our health system.”

Look for:

• Regular television and radio spots featuring UW Medicine experts and patients.on Fisher Communication’s KOMO News, KOMO News Radio and STAR 101.5. Topics for the first three months include heart, vascular and brain health.

• A new dedicated website, UW Medicine Health, uwmedicinehealth.com. It will have timely news items, features and columns about health and wellness, medical research advances and patient stories.

KOMO news anchor Molly Shen will introduce the program to viewers and listeners of KOMO News, KOMO News Radio and Star 101.5. The first series of TV and radio spots on heart health will begin April 8. During these segments, UW Medicine experts and patients will share stories and insights about the care they received at UW Medicine.

This month’s articles on heart health include:

• UW Medicine Regional Heart Center leads in heart care.
• How to reduce your risk of coronary artery disease.
• New defibrillator for treating heart rhythm disorders.
• Multi-specialty care saves a triathlon runner with heart disease.

###

For more information, contact UW Medicine Strategic Marketing & Communications at 206-543-3620.

“The Afterlife of Empire” was published in November 2012 by the University of California Press.

Jordanna Bailkin is a University of Washington professor of history and author of the new book “The Afterlife of Empire.” She answered a few questions about the book for UW Today.

Q: What is the central concept behind this book?

A: I wanted to understand how Britain and Britons were affected by losing their empire, and how they were changed — often in deeply personal ways — by this process of decolonization.

Q: Why do you use what you describe as the “spectral” term “afterlife”?

A: One of the arguments of the book is that the relationships that were forged in imperial days were not necessary brought to an end when formal imperialism declined. Instead, they could be galvanized and even intensified. Ironically, decolonization often brought Britons into even closer contact with their former colonial subjects.

Q: You discuss the relationship between empire’s end and the beginnings of social welfare, stating parenthetically, “Indeed, empire’s final gasp could be said to take place in the domain of welfare.” Would you explain?

A: The rise of the welfare state and the decline of the empire are two of the stock themes of 20th-century British history. But they have always been treated as separate chapters, as if they were unrelated.

I wanted to write this book partly as a way to explore how decolonization and welfare were actually intertwined. Some of the final projects of the empire took place in the realm of development, which we might see as a distinctive form of welfare. But more specifically, I wanted to understand how some of the key domains of welfare — mental health, education, child care — were shaped by British perceptions of the demands of decolonization.

Q: You state that decolonization changed the lives of Brits whether they knew it or not at the time. How does the post-imperial Britain of the 21st century differ from the Britain that held an empire?

Jordanna Bailkin

A: The history of decolonization is usually told through its diplomatic and military details, as a matter of state. But I think it’s important to remember that ordinary individuals, too, were transformed through this process. Their everyday routines, social interactions and family structures were changed by decolonization as well.Just to take one example, as Ghana and Nigeria became independent, tens of thousands of West Africans traveled to Britain for higher education. Frequently, they placed their children in private foster care arrangements with white, working-class women. There were numerous long-term effects of these deep — and deeply complicated — relationships, including different types of child care resources that were provided by the state for African and British children. This is just one of the ways in which the afterlife of empire persisted for decades, and into the present day itself.

Q: Finally, what do you hope readers will take away from this book?

A: I hope to encourage readers to think about this charged term of “decolonization,” and what it actually meant. I suggest that decolonization was taking place not only in the former colonies but also in Britain itself, where it reshaped the structures of the welfare state.

Thus, it was a process that bore intimately on the social lives and experiences of ordinary Britons and migrants. But, ultimately, rather than fixing a single definition of decolonization as a diplomatic, military, cultural or social phenomenon, my work aims to recapture the cacophony about what decolonization meant for different historical actors.

• “The Afterlife of Empire” was published in November 2012 by the University of California Press, part of its Berkeley Series in British Studies.

University of Washington students have been testing low-cost materials capable of harvesting water from fog in a temporary “hoop house” next to the Botany Greenhouse. They create the fog with a specially adapted power washer and record how much water condenses and drips off various panels of low-cost materials, such as shade cloth.

P Cromwell/U of Washington

In tests on campus this month, faculty member Ben Spencer checks the water condensing and dripping down matting material used in landscapes to control soil erosion. The group is evaluating inexpensive, readily available materials for fog harvesting.

They specifically want to find a way to help residents on the northern edge of Lima, Peru, where less than half an inch of rain falls, but heavy fogs occur consistently for six to nine months a year. The faculty and students are seeking a way to condense enough water to irrigate new plantings that would, in turn, harvest fog on their own, naturally bringing water into the landscape, said Susan Bolton, a professor of environmental and forest sciences and one of the group’s instructors.

To that end, they are also testing various plants as fog collectors: Vines, for example, because winemaking is a growing industry in Peru and residents might plant vineyards. Or perhaps a city park with trees could be created.

The landscape once had trees that collected fog, but 500 years ago Spanish colonizers denuded Lima’s fog-fed dry forests.

The UW group and 43 other university teams last year competed and each received a $15,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet program. Teams are developing ideas to make such things as water, energy and agriculture more sustainable in developed or developing countries. In April the groups will send representatives to Washington, D.C., trying to win one of the grants worth up to $90,000 to implement their ideas.

Doug Ewing, who runs the botany greenhouse, heard about the project and helped the group adapt some of equipment used in the greenhouse. He and his crew, for example, use a power washer set-up, but with a different nozzle, in the greenhouse to cool plants when it gets hot.

Humans have long fashioned structures meant to cause dew or fog to condense. Today, for example, the Canadian non-profit FogQuest tries to help communities, particularly in Chile, harvest drinking water. FogQuest says a 48-square-yard fog collector can produce an average of more than 50 gallons per day.

“We hope we improve upon standard fog collection models by finding ways to increase collection rates while decreasing the amount of material used and energy needed by communities to construct and maintain the collectors,” said Peter Cromwell, a graduate student in landscape architecture.

“The UW project wants to take that a step farther by thinking about it as part of larger social, environmental and economic systems,” said Ben Spencer, assistant professor of landscape architecture. “Our focus on fog collection as a source of water for households and irrigation of green space responds directly to priorities expressed by the community. Low-cost systems of fog collection would empower the community to take charge of their own water resources and improve their environment and living conditions.”

Mary Levin

Graduating medical student Anisa Ibrahim, at Match Day with her husband and baby daughter, will train as a pediatrician.

As the clock approaches 9 a.m, Friday, March 15, fourth-year University of Washington medical student Anisa Ibrahim awaits the sound of the gong with “a mixture of excitement and anxiety.” It’s the signal that will send her, along with fellow UW medical students gathered in the Health Sciences lobby, to the long tables of elegant purple-and-gold boxes containing their futures as beginning physicians.

Match Day, which takes place on the same day every year at medical schools across the nation, is when thousands of graduating medical students find out – at exactly the same time –  where they will train as residents via the National Resident Matching Program.

This year, 222 senior UW medical students learned of their 2013 residency positions at simultaneous gatherings across the UW School of Medicine’s five-state WWAMI region (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho), including Match Day celebrations in Seattle, Billings, Missoula, Spokane, Boise and Anchorage.

Mary Levin

Seth Stratton learns he will be training in internal medicine at Northwestern.

For Ibrahim, the anticipation builds as she waits with her husband and young daughter to learn where she will begin the path to fulfilling her dream of becoming a pediatrician. Originally from Somalia, Ibrahim is the oldest of five children and the first in her family to attend college. She moved to Seattle as a young child, completed her undergraduate education at UW, and hopes to match at Seattle Children’s, her first choice for residency.

“But I think I’d be happy anywhere,” she said with a big smile.

Moments later Ibrahim, mom to two young daughters, is clearly elated when she learns she will be starting her residency at Seattle Children’s.

Mary Levin

Anisa Ibrahim is delighted with her residency match notification letter. First choice, Seattle Children’s!

“I am just thrilled,” she beamed.

UW medical student Seth Stratton said he’s quite happy with his second choice match at Northwestern University (his first choice was Vanderbilt). He’s the son of two UW faculty members: Dr. John Stratton, professor of medicine in the Division of  Cardiology, and Carolyn-Webster Stratton, a child psychologist and professor emeritus of family and child nursing. Seth said he plans to go into internal medicine with an eventual focus in cardiology and pulmonary/critical care medicine.

“It a unique opportunity to experience a different medical culture at a different place,” he said, adding with a smile, “though my parents probably would’ve been happier if I’d decided I wanted to stay here.”

Mary Levin

Medical student Ria Andrade and her husband share a toast. Ria plans to practice family medicine  in a medically underserved area.

Ria  Andrade, originally from Whittier, Calif., which she describes as “east of East L.A.,” applied only to family medicine community residency programs in southern California, because she’s eager to return to the region “where they’re doing the best at serving the populations I want to serve — the underserved and the undocumented.”

So Andrade and her husband of five years were delighted when she matched at her first choice for residency: Long Beach Memorial Medical Center.

Mary Levin

“I feel at peace today,” said Estell Williams, who learned she will train as a surgeon at the UW.

Estell Williams, the youngest of seven children and also the first in her family to go to college, also matched at her first choice: UW. She plans to become a surgeon and to continue her work to address the underrepresentation of minorities in medicine and healthcare disparities across populations.

Describing her emotions leading up to Match Day as “more excitement than anxiety,” Williams said she couldn’t be happier to have landed at UW.

“I feel at peace today,” she said. “I’ve worked hard for it – we all have.”

This year’s National Match is the largest in the history of the program. Read about some of the Match 2013 statistics nationwide.

Kelly Paradis, left, and Jacob Dishion

Felons who serve part of their prison sentence in the community may now have the right to publicly funded DNA testing, thanks to a court victory won by a student representing the University of Washington School of Law’s Innocence Project Northwest.

“It’s a big victory that expands the right of access to DNA testing for individuals we represent in the future,” said Jacqueline McMurtrie, UW professor of law and director of the project, which she founded in 1997.

Student Jacob Dishion worked with classmate Kelly Paradis and Anna Tolin, a visiting lecturer and the project’s deputy director, as well as other law students, to argue the case against veteran attorneys for the state of Washington in the case of State v. Slattum.

The state argued that only felons actually in jail or prison qualify for publicly funded DNA testing under a 2001 state law, and that extending such tests to those in restricted “community custody” — who outnumber prison convicts by about two to one — would be prohibitively expensive and overburden the state crime lab.

But a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals, Division One — which covers Washington’s King, Snohomish, Skagit, Island and Whatcom counties — ruled in the Innocence Project’s favor. In an opinion issued Feb. 19, the court unanimously ruled that felons serving part of their sentences in the community are eligible for publicly funded DNA testing if they file a qualifying claim that they are innocent. The state has 30 days from Feb. 19 in which to file an appeal to the state Supreme Court.

At issue was whether statutory language referring to “imprisonment” includes sentences served under community custody. The court held that since the word is ambiguous, it was bound under the “rule of lenity” to grant the petition. The rule of lenity holds that if a criminal statute has been deemed ambiguous regarding punishments, the ambiguity should be resolved toward the more lenient punishment.

The ruling marks the first time the UW’s Innocence Project Northwest won an appellate case with a student presenting the oral argument.

“It was a huge thrill to find out that all the work we put into it translated a positive result,” said Dishion, a third-year UW law student from Eugene, Ore. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous going into it.”

The Innocence Project Northwest, part of a national network, represents low-income people in Washington who are serving long prison terms, claim their innocence and no longer have a right to court-appointed counsel. The project also trains law students in legislative and public policy advocacy on wrongful conviction issues.

This is the first appellate ruling on this issue in Washington, establishing a precedent for other state courts.

###

For more information, contact Tolin at 206-221-8411 or atolin@uw.edu, or McMurtrie at
206-543-5780 or jackiem@uw.edu.

UW Science Now kicks off at Town Hall tonight

Sonia Singhal, a doctoral student in UW’s Department of Biology, says evolution is a prominent force in the present as well as the past. As the website about her talk says: We don’t even need to wait centuries to see its results. With bacteria and viruses, we have the powerful ability to watch evolution happen before our eyes in a matter of days. It can help advance technology against the flu, the common cold and even computer viruses. Singhal speaks at 5:30 p.m. at The Pub at Town Hall, enter on Eighth Avenue.

At 5:30 p.m., Wednesday (March 6) Juliana Houghton, a master’s student at UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, addresses the impact of San Juan whale-watching on the whales themselves. The website about her talk says: As researchers consider steps to help killer whales recover, they study the effects of vessel presence and a noisy environment yet still don’t know what whales actually hear as they travel through the water. Recently, a suction-cup-attached tag with an underwater microphone has been used to measure the noise whales actually receive.

A total of 19 UW Science Now talks have been scheduled, often before or after other science talks by local and national speakers at Town Hall.

The students are in the course “Communicating Science to the Public Effectively,” that grew out of efforts in 2010 by UW graduate students who felt students needed better opportunities for training in science communication, says the instructor for the course, Jessica Rohde, a graduate student in aquatic and fishery sciences.

“They started teaching each other, which eventually turned into a course and speaker series at Town Hall. The College of the Environment has fully supported their efforts, and now funds a TA -ship for the course,” Rohde said.

Tickets are $5 at www.townhallseattle.org or 888-377-4510, and at the door beginning at 5:30 pm.

Celebrating UW Women nominations due March 11
Members of the campus community can submit nominations for female UW students, staff and faculty deserving of recognition. All women nominated will be recognized at a reception in late March at the Hub Lyceum. The award was created to honor women from across campus as part of Women’s History Month.

Nominations require an essay of 250 words or less describing the contribution of the nominee. Deadline is Monday (March 11).

Nominations sought for fourth annual Husky Green Awards
Nominations are due March 30 the fourth annual Husky Green Awards meant to recognize individuals or teams from the UW community who demonstrate leadership, initiative and dedication to campus sustainability.

Last year’s winners are featured in a video produced by a student volunteer with the UW Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability Office.

Nominations should include a description of how an individual or team from the UW community demonstrated environmental stewardship or campus sustainability at the Seattle, Tacoma or Bothell campuses. Submissions are encouraged to include descriptions of measurable outcomes resulting from the nominee’s actions as well as descriptions of collaborations and efforts to engage the broader community in sustainability efforts. Two references are required for a nomination submission.

Grade-school students take on philosophy in panel discussion
The UW Department of Philosophy will celebrate its Philosophers in the Schools program and the new book “The Philosophical Child” by Jana Mohr Lone with a panel discussion from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in the HUB Lyceum. The event will feature fourth- and fifth-grade students from Seattle’s Whittier Elementary School. Lone is an affiliate UW faculty member and director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children. RSVP if possible to kgoldyn@uw.edu.

Hall Health Center expands tobacco cessation program
Hall Health Primary Care Center is increasing its free services for those in the UW community who want to quit using tobacco through a new program called “Tobacco Talk.”

The campus medical center now has a part-time tobacco cessation specialist who can meet with students and employees on a one-to-one basis. After the first session, subsequent meetings can be done by phone. Tobacco Talk also provides nicotine replacement products such as patches and gum. All services are free to both students and UW employees.

For more information, contact Colin Maloney, Tobacco Cessation Program coordinator, at 206-685-QUIT (7848) or quittalk@uw.edu.

Less widely known is that these mainstream performers arose from a local music community rich with women artists.

The Women Who Rock: Building Scenes, Making Communities Project, a collaboration between University of Washington and community organizers, scholars and artists, nurtures this scene. The project will hold its third “unconference” combined with the launch of its oral history archive March 9 at Washington Hall in Seattle’s Central Area. The public event features live music and is open to all ages. Registration is free.

“Thriving local music communities provide a matrix for almost every artist who crosses into the mainstream,” said Michelle Habell-Pallán, one of the founding organizers of the project and a UW associate professor in gender, women and sexuality studies. “This conference calls attention to these local scenes and the women who activate them. The event celebrates the history of multiple Seattle music scenes and the relationships artists in those scenes have with each other and to communities in California, Mexico and beyond.”

The organizers call the March 9 event an unconference, because participants shape the content. They propose ideas in advance and then choose what workshops they want to participate in the day of the conference. Topics submitted so far highlight the ways community organizers are archiving history, such as memoir-writing through music, women making hip-hop scenes, and screen printing as a form of building archives.

Attendees should arrive at 11 a.m. to choose workshops, which run from noon until 3 p.m. Other events and performances will last until 10 p.m. See the schedule for more information on the speakers and performers.

The theme “Rock the Archive” for this year’s conference is a shout-out to the launch of an oral history archive of interviews of musicians, producers, journalists, scholars and others familiar with the Seattle music community. The UW Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Program will house the archive.

At its launch, the Women Who Rock Oral History Archive will include 13 of more than 60 histories gathered so far. The rest of the oral histories will go online over the next year and will be continually added to as more people are interviewed.

“The archive tells the life stories of people who have been deeply involved in making music scenes and building community,” said Angelica Macklin, a UW graduate student in gender, women and sexuality studies who is part of the team collecting and curating the archive.

The archive helps build the music scene, too. “Gretta Harley and her play ‘These Streets’ is a great example of how we have envisioned people engaging with the Women Who Rock Project,” Macklin said. The UW collection will include about 40 histories collected as part of Harley’s research for “These Streets” – playing at ACT in Seattle through March 10 – chronicling Seattle’s female rockers.

“People are creating amazing new stories that change our perspectives and understandings of our own history and impact how we produce the world we live in,” Macklin said.

Here’s a video preview of the archive:

The UW archive provides free material online to anyone wishing to make documentaries, create a curriculum or to tell histories in other ways, said Sonnet Retman, UW associate professor of American ethnic studies and an organizer of the Women Who Rock Project.

“This comes at a moment when a lot of feminist popular music archives are being formed,” Retman said. But whereas other archives are static repositories of artists’ papers or other written documents, the UW archive will grow as oral histories are collected.

In spring 2014, Habell-Pallán and Retman will teach an undergraduate “Women Who Rock” course based on the archive.

The Women Who Rock Project is funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, with additional support from other UW and community sponsors.

###

For more information, contact Habell-Pallán at 206-543-6981 or mhabellp@uw.edu; Macklin at amacklin@uw.edu; or Retman at 206-543-0470 or sretman@uw.edu.

• Three-week cruise starts Feb. 25
• Follow along on the students’ blog

With winter quarter in full swing and many students spending long hours in the library or the lab, a group of undergraduates will leave the coast of Japan for an unusually ambitious research and teaching expedition.

They leave Monday (Feb. 25) and will travel for about three weeks, flying back to Seattle in mid-March. It’s part of a senior-level course, Ocean 444: Advanced Field Oceanography, that will induct 11 seniors into the UW tradition of ship-based undergraduate research.

“The students are going to find out exactly what oceanographers do, and they’re either going to like it or not,” said instructor Steven Emerson, a UW professor of oceanography. “For sure, it’s going to be something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

Members of the UW cruise to study the Kuroshio Current. In the center (l-r) are professors Stephen Riser and Steven Emerson, with one of 18 UW-built floats they will deploy.

Emerson and fellow instructor and oceanography professor Stephen Riser are chief scientists on one of the UW’s most far-flung undergraduate cruises.

In previous years, students have gone on research cruises off the coast of Washington, Vancouver Island and between Seattle and Hawaii. Last year’s combined research and teaching cruise took place off the coast of Chile.

This year’s goal is to study the Pacific equivalent to the Gulf Stream, known as the Kuroshio Current, which flows northward along the coast of Japan. It’s known that the fast current absorbs unusually high quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the reason is a mystery.

UW faculty and graduate students hope to understand what role organisms play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they can improve computer models that try to predict how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect the climate.

Four scientists and three graduate students will conduct their own research while assisting the undergraduates.

Students will carry out individual undergraduate research projects collecting data to study water movement, acidity, and the relationship between satellite imagery and abundance of marine plant and animal life. Their research will become senior-level theses, and in some cases could lead to scientific publications.

“It’s one thing to sit in class and learn the theory, or even help with someone else’s research,” said Mariela Tuquero, a UW oceanography senior from Tacoma. “It’s another thing to have your own project that you care about, to be getting data that’s personal to you and interpreting the results.”

She said she’s excited, but also a little nervous – she has packed a box of Dramamine to help with seasickness.

Students begin in fall quarter learning about field research and designing their projects. In winter quarter they collect data and in the spring they will interpret that data, write a paper and present their findings.

During this year’s cruise UW researchers will deploy 18 robotic floats built in Riser’s lab, which will join more than 3,000 that already measure temperature and salinity in the top half mile of the world’s oceans. These new floats include sensors fine-tuned by UW faculty and graduate students to precisely measure the amount of dissolved oxygen, which helps to detect the rate of photosynthesis.

Steven Emerson

The ship will sail out of Yokohama and travel southeast for about 500 miles, then turn northeast and cross the Kuroshio Current twice before returning to shore.

Within a few hours of deployment, the new floats will begin to dive down, gradually rise to the surface, and beam data back to the UW. By this time next year the team will have a full year’s cycle of vertical profiles collected every 10 days. The floats will continue to collect data for about five years, until their batteries die and they sink to the ocean floor.

“Studying oxygen gives us some information about biological productivity,” Emerson said. “By March 2014 these floats will generate 18 annual cycles in different areas of the Kuroshio Current off of Japan.”

The cruise will take place on a Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel because the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel has been undergoing repairs. The research portion of the cruise is supported by the National Science Foundation. The student ship time is supported by the State of Washington, through an agreement that brought the Thompson to the UW in 1991 in exchange for 40 days each summer of ship-based undergraduate research.

“I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities I’ve had at the university,” Tuquero said.

Not so according to the new book “Inside the Undergraduate Teaching Experience” based on in-depth interviews with 55 University of Washington faculty members.

The authors, also from the UW, will present their findings at 2:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 25 in the Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall.

About 46 percent of the faculty participants were identified by department chairs as “thoughtful about teaching”; 31 percent were randomly selected; and 23 percent were selected by interviewers for a number of reasons.  Statistical comparisons of the responses of faculty in these three groups showed no significant differences in the kinds of improvements they tried to make to their courses or their reasons for making them.  In other words, faculty known to be “thoughtful” about teaching and those who are not so known gave their teaching work the same kind of attention.

Study participants were asked about two classes that they have taught and changes they have made in their teaching, big or small, over the years.

What the authors found is that changes in teaching occurred across disciplines, among teaching award winners and renowned researchers, with new faculty and those who have been at the UW 35 years or more. “Change in teaching was a constant,” the authors write.  “This result buries the image of university professors lecturing from notes that have yellowed from 15 years of use.”

The authors found that these changes were a product of faculty interaction with students and were not motivated by institutional mandates or incentives. Moreover, the changes were fundamental and carefully thought through. They were not undertaken lightly because they consumed time, energy and required self-assessment about whether those changes were, in fact, improvements.

Moreover, the changes that faculty were making are ones that research confirms as being the best ways to enhance student learning – namely, by promoting student engagement with the material and encouraging active learning.

For Catharine Beyer, a co-author and research scientist in the Office of Educational Assessment, the findings confirm observations that she made of teachers in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program over 13 years. “I watched faculty make incredible changes in their approach to teaching over time,” she says. “I could see the things they were doing to become better teachers.”

Her co-authors were Ed Taylor, dean and provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs, and Gerald Gillmore, former director of the Office of Educational Assessment. In a way, the current study is an outgrowth of Beyer’s findings in a longitudinal study of undergraduate learning conducted from 1999 to 2003. “Students talked about the role of faculty as crucial in their learning, and described how active learning was enhancing their education,” she says.

In one sense, the findings are not surprising, reflecting that individuals who spend a great deal of time in a particular activity – teaching – are concerned with improving their performance. “This is the way that people who care about their work behave, people who love what they are doing and want to be better at it,” Beyer says. Although the research was conducted at the UW, she says the findings are likely to apply broadly across higher education.

The book describes a seasoning and winnowing process that occurs as faculty mature and become comfortable as teachers.  “When they start, most faculty throw everything they know at the students, often because they don’t know what else to do,” Beyer says. “But later, they think about paring back the material, concentrating on what is most important.  They start to see the students differently, as learners rather than knowers.” Some begin to observe how their peers teach. Some will find a mentor.

“What we see is not simply a change in techniques,” she says. It is a change in the sense of self, a stage of personal growth where instructors feel comfortable figuring out whether students are learning what the instructor wants them to learn from that class and how to increase that learning.”

What lessons does Beyer take away that could improve the quality of undergraduate education?  If money were no object, she would double the number of faculty, so that classes were smaller and students would have more one-on-one time with faculty.  She would make teaching mentors available to new faculty members from inside and outside their home departments and encourage new faculty to observe the mentors and others in the classroom. .  Peer evaluation can also sometimes be a good way to learn from others.

Says Ed Taylor, “We are now, in our Center for Teaching and Learning, collaborating with faculty members, graduate instructors, and undergraduate peer educators and staff to create new ways for faculty to teach, mentor each other, use technology, and engage students in innovative ways. We want to stay the course and do more:  More ways of inviting new faculty into the community, new ways of inviting experienced faculty to share what they have learned and to continue learning. I would provide resources to support the growing diversity of our student body and the increasingly diverse ways in which learning can happen and the multiple roles that faculty and staff serve as educators of our students. Teaching is not a private practice–formation of a learning community is our aim.”

“We need to spread the word about how well we are doing in teaching undergraduates,” Beyer says.  “It’s not true that college students need to choose between high-quality educational offerings at smaller schools or settle for less than top quality teaching at a research university.”

MyPlan makes it easier for students to find courses, develop an academic plan, track progress, and receive adviser input. Advisers have the ability to review and comment on academic plans electronically and view easy-to-read (html-enhanced) degree audits.

Released this academic year, MyPlan was developed by UW-IT in partnership with students, advisers, and central partners in the Office of the Registrar, Graduate School, and Undergraduate Academic Affairs. It is funded in part by the Student Technology Fee and is a project of Kuali Student, the next-generation student administrative system being developed and shared by a consortium of top-tier universities including the UW, a founding member.

Key features of MyPlan include:

• Course search feature using the published Time Schedule information for current and upcoming academic quarters, and Course Catalog information for long-term academic planning
• Easy-to-read, color-coded HTML Degree Audit to explore undergraduate programs and determine requirements met or needing completion
• Ability to Bookmark courses of interest for future consideration
• Plan sharing and commenting system for student and adviser conversations

Coming next, MyPlan will address high-priority needs identified by students, including adding course section details so students can better plan for time/date availability, instructor, and enrollment restrictions; adviser-created sample plans and suggested courses for departmental majors; and the ability to audit their plan.

MyPlan is the UW’s first Kuali Student product to be released at the university. It is being contributed back to Kuali and is now being adopted by Indiana University. A benefit of being part of the Kuali community is that the UW can then adopt enhancements made by other universities to shared products like MyPlan.

Watch a video overview of MyPlan to better understand how advisers and students can use this tool during the academic planning process.

Michael Forster Rothbart

University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine professor Dr. Yoshihoro Kawaoka will speak Jan. 19 at the UW on pandemic influenza.

Influenza virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose research findings met with an extensive review by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity last year, and generated continuing public debate on publishing infectious agent study results, will speak at the UW. His talk on “Pandemic Influenza “ is scheduled for 9 a.m., Tuesday,  Feb. 19 in Hogness Auditorium at the UW Health Sciences Center. The UW Department of Microbiology is sponsoring the free lecture.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity provides oversight on dual use research. The term refers to  biological studies with legitimate scientific purpose that may be misused to pose a threat to public health or national security

Kawaoka and his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine study the molecular mechanism of interspecies flu virus transmission that can lead to influenza pandemics in humans and how the virus operates in poultry and mammals. He teaches the diagnosis and management of viral diseases in animals to veterinary students.

His group discovered four mutations that make a flu virus more transmissible among ferrets through sneezing and coughing. Publication of the paper in Nature magazine was stopped last February due to concerns that releasing the results publicly would pose a bioterrorism risk. Near the same time, publication in Science of an influenza paper by Dr. Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center was also halted.

Kawaoka based his defense on the fact that similar transmission studies had been conducted and published for years, that the work was important to developing treatments and vaccines against avian flu and to improving international surveillance of the emergence of more serious forms of influenza. He also noted that his lab was diligent in its safety and security measures. The biosecurity panel reversed its decision last March in a recommendation accepted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Kawaoka was then free to speak about this work and Nature was allowed to fully publish his paper.  Publication of the Foucher paper was permitted in redacted form.

A new report showed about a 50 percent increase in speech comprehension in background noise when children with hearing impairments followed a three-week auditory training regimen. The effect was still evident when the children were tested three months after the training ended.

The findings are among the first to demonstrate that auditory training with noise can work in children. Other studies show that similar regimens help hearing-impaired adults.

The training involves repeated exposure to speech masked by noise, and is intended to teach the brain how to receive information and process it more efficiently. This could help hearing-impaired children who struggle to keep up in noisy classrooms.

“It’s not a fair playing field with their normal-hearing peers,” said Jessica Sullivan, lead author and a University of Washington assistant professor of speech and hearing sciences. “They have the best technology, but it’s not enough – they still miss things.”

People with normal hearing usually filter out background noise seamlessly. If a loud truck rumbles by, they can still understand a conversation because their brains work quickly to fill in sounds that they might have missed.

But people with hearing loss take in sound more slowly, and brain regions that process hearing aren’t as adept at filling in muffled information.

In Sullivan’s study, published in the January issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, hearing-impaired youngsters ages 6 to 17 attended seven one-hour sessions spread across three weeks. They listened to a series of sentences, such as “We saw two brown bears” or “Grandmother gave Bob red beans,” masked by staticky background noise intended to simulate a clattering classroom scene.

During the sessions, Sullivan gradually made the regimen more demanding by ratcheting up the number of words in the sentences, the noise volume and the time between hearing the sentence and identifying what words were said. The children had to give correct answers 80 percent of the time before advancing to the next level of difficulty.

Three months after the training, the participants still showed improvements in word recognition over the noise.

Sullivan also found that auditory training with a crackling noise – called “interrupted” because white noise was interspersed with fleeting five- to 95-millisecond silences – increased hearing comprehension more than using continuous white noise. Children in the interrupted noise group showed about a 50 percent increase in speech intelligibility compared with their hearing at the beginning of the experiment.

“The maintenance of the improvement is a truly significant finding,” Sullivan said. “It indicates that new hearing and listening strategies have been developed to detect speech despite noise.”

The next step in the research is to see how the regimen works for other people, such as adults and cochlear-implant users, and to other types of noise, including real-world settings.

Co-authors are Linda Thibodeau and Peter Assmann of the University of Texas at Dallas, where the study was conducted. The study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

###

For more information, contact Sullivan at 206-616-5273 or sulli10@uw.edu

Ashley Wiggin

Doctor of Nursing Practice student Ann Pedack performs an examination on fellow student Desiree Wood. Sam Li, also a Doctor of Nursing Practice student, acts as an “advisor” in this setting. Students perform simulated examinations as part of their training in the program.

The UW School of Nursing is re-envisioning and restructuring the curriculum in its Doctor of Nursing Practice program with an initiative that builds on the school’s long history of national distinction in preparing advanced practice nurses for a variety of careers.

The program, which had its first class of students beginning in 2007, prepares nurses for independent practice and leadership in careers such as community nursing, critical-care nursing, psychiatric mental health nursing, adult, gerontology, family and pediatric nursing, and nurse-midwifery.

As the program has grown, specialty tracks developed independently, which created a complex model that was ultimately unsustainable fiscally. To address these issues, a faculty work group collaborated during the summer of 2012 to re-envision the program.

The group proposed a consolidated program that upholds the foundations of advanced practice, clinical inquiry and leadership within a delineated structure. This increased core creates consistency for students while maintaining their ability to sit for national certification in role and population tracks, allowing appropriate levels of clinical experience, and ensuring flexibility for future program changes. The consolidation reduces costs by 26 percent, better aligning with current resources and tuition affordability.

The faculty committee aligned the curriculum with the current national standards for accreditation in doctoral education and with the expectations of state boards of nursing and national task forces on advanced practice nursing, while trying to ensure that students are prepared for certification exams and for practice. Students in the Doctor of Nursing Practice program have achieved nearly a 100 percent passing rate on national certification exams to date, and School of Nursing faculty want to maintain that performance and enhance students’ doctoral education and foster their success after graduation.

The new program model was approved by school faculty in fall 2012 and its implementation is planned for the class entering the fall of 2013.

At last month’s American Association of Colleges of Nursing Doctoral Forum in San Diego, three peer-reviewed papers, each co-authored by several UW faculty members, were presented. They outlined how the school  redefined the existing program, reaffirmed program goals, developed a consistent core curriculum, and made the program more financially sustainable.

Gail Kieckhefer, professor of family and child nursing; Cindy Dougherty, professor of biobehavioral nursing and health systems; and Cindy Perry, associate professor of family and child nursing, gave presentations at the conference, which was attended by national nursing leaders.

Dougherty said the work at UW will benefit others trying to incorporate program changes in a resource-challenged environment. Following their presentations, several other schools asked the UW faculty members to share information on how to “systematically change their curriculum” and integrate a program similar to the UW’s at their own schools.

“Faculty from the University of Wisconsin and Rush University spent time with us to talk about how we are merging our tracks in core coursework. They were also interested in our plans for inter-professional education,” said Kieckhefer.

“It was pretty clear, from listening to the 700 plus AACN doctoral conference attendees, that the UW School of Nursing is staying abreast of issues around doctoral education and, in many ways, leading,” said Maggie Baker, interim associate dean for academic services in the School of Nursing. “For example, our work to revise the (Doctor of Nursing Practice) curriculum and our work around doctoral-level recruitment and retention is clearly on par with that our peer institutions and, in many ways, cutting-edge.”

The UW School of Nursing is consistently a top-rated nursing school, according to U.S. News & World Report surveys and analyses, and is ranked No. 2 in research funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2011.

A. “Transcending Blackness” is about mixed-race African-American representations in the 10 years leading up to Obama’s election in 2008.

Q. You review representations of multiracial figures in popular culture. Who did you research and what came from this?

A. I’ve collected popular — and not so popular — representations of multiracial black folks for most of my life. Like many teenagers I was addicted to fashion magazines and by the time I left for college I had a 3-foot stack amassed in the back of my closet.  I loved the images of “racially ambiguous” models and actresses, and I would study their images and the occasional stories about them for hours.

Duke University Press

“Transcending Blackness,” by Ralina L. Joseph.

I was lucky to begin college at the same moment that mixed-race became a topic of interest for scholars and the mass media. The ever-growing representations (and embodiment) of multiraciality — in popular culture, academia, and my dormitory  enabled me to not just worship the images of mixed-race, but also think critically about them.

Q. What were your conclusions?

A. In this book my critical thinking led me to the conclusion that popular representations of mixed-race African-Americans in the late 20^th/early 21^st century are nowhere near as complex as the real, live mixed-race African-Americans in my life.

In real life multiracial black folks identify in all sorts of ways — as sometimes black, sometimes mixed, sometimes as no race at all — and this might be the same person’s choices all in different moments in the same day!

Ralina Joseph

But in representations, I found that the old stereotypes of the tragic mulatto (the figure who is forever damned because of her drop of blackness) and the sell-out multiracial (the figure who is only successful because she does everything in her power to dismiss her blackness) are alive and well.

I tweaked my terminology and definitions to fit our contemporary moment, and so my tragic mulatto becomes the “new millennium mulatta” and my sell-out multiracial becomes the “exceptional multiracial.” I see both of these representations as far from neutral, but instead mired in anti-black racism.

“The ultimate goal is to show that the computerized instruction is effective and transportable to schools to help classroom teachers,” Berninger said.

Participants will go to the UW Center for Oral and Written Language Learners for 18 sessions of reading and writing lessons administered on an iPad. If they wish, participants can give a small blood sample that will be tested for genetic variants related to language learning. Those who choose to be in the brain imaging part of the study, which uses magnetic resonance imaging, will receive copies of their own brain scans.

The project is funded by a five-year, $8.1 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Public Health co-hosts “Gun Violence: A Public-Health Crisis” tonight
The University of Washington School of Public Health and Seattle’s Town Hall are co-hosting a forum at 7:30, tonight (Feb. 4) at Town Hall to lay out a public-health approach to gun violence.

Panelists will trace the extent of the problem, explore evidence-based solutions, consider mental-health aspects and new alternatives, discuss new policies in Seattle-King County and Washington state, and consider what each of us can do.

“Gun violence is a fraught topic in our society, with much of the debate framed by ideology, fear and inflexibility,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health, who will give the opening remarks. “A public health approach – as applied to challenges ranging from influenza to obesity, from polio to heart attacks, from smoking to traffic safety – offers a unique point of view, important insights and even guidelines for action.”

Among the other panelists is Dr. Frederick Rivara, UW professor of pediatrics and epidemiology, speaking on the research about guns and violence.

Cost is $5.

Timothy DeRouen

The center will be headed by Timothy A. DeRouen, professor of oral health sciences in the School of Dentistry and of biostatistics in the School of Public Health. He was interim dean of the School of Dentistry from 2011 to 2012.

“We’ll be looking for more opportunities to work with other institutions and countries, and for more opportunities for our faculty as well,” DeRouen said. “The idea is to enhance what we do, and increase the range of possibilities through research and education.”

The School of Dentistry is already an active international player in oral health, with collaborations and interactions involving more than 40 other countries. Faculty members conduct dozens of international research partnerships and lecture abroad, while dental students and professionals from around the world visit Seattle.

Many come here for the school’s Summer Institute in Clinical Dental Research Methods, which DeRouen

founded in 1992 and has directed ever since. The Summer Institute has drawn nearly 500 students from more than 40 other countries, along with 30 states in this country.

DeRouen said he anticipates establishing working ties between the new center and the Global Oral Health Inequalities Research Network of the International Association for Dental Research. He also expects to be working with the Global Oral Health Interest Group of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, as well as the UW’s Department of Global Health, in which DeRouen recently received a joint faculty appointment.  Dr. King Holmes, the department’s William H. Foege Chair and Professor, has called the new center “an exciting initiative.”

DeRouen’s name is already well established in oral health research circles. Before becoming interim dean of dentistry at the UW, he was the school’s executive associate dean for research and academic affairs. He also directed the school’s Northwest PRECEDENT regional practice-based research network. This year, he will become president-elect of the American Association for Dental Research, and then president in 2014.

“Tim DeRouen has been an outstanding leader in oral health research and education,” said UW School of

Dentistry Dean  Joel Berg. “I believe that he is uniquely suited to build on our strong tradition in this field and to further enhance the UW’s standing in the international oral health community.”

The Center for Global Oral Health will oversee existing activities such as the Summer Institute, along with a clinical, behavioral and public health research training collaboration with several universities in Thailand. The latter program is funded by a training grant from the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health. The agenda also encompasses a study of orofacial clefts in Thailand, proposals for oral health disparities research in Peru, and ongoing student exchange programs in Chile, Taiwan and Thailand.

DeRouen said that the Center for Global Oral Health already has drawn interest from several leading School of Dentistry faculty researchers, who have been invited to join as affiliates. They include Berg, who is also the current president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, and Peter Milgrom, who in 2012 received the American Dental Association’s Norton M. Ross Award for Excellence in Clinical Research, the association’s highest such honor.

The University of Washington School of Law and Jackson School for International Studies, and other partners, present a daylong seminar on Friday, Feb. 8, titled “Towards Global Food Law: Transatlantic Competition and Collaboration.” Registration is online and costs $50.

“This conference will highlight new developments in food safety law in the U.S. and the European Union, noting where their regulatory strategies converge and where they diverge, as well as examples of ‘smart’ regulation that protect the public without distorting markets,” wrote Jane Winn, UW professor of law.

After an introduction by Pat Kuszler, UW School of Law associate dean and director of its Center for Law, Science and Global Health, food safety attorney William Marler will give the keynote address, “Strengths and Weaknesses of Litigation as a Food Safety Regulation Strategy.”

Pharmacy faculty member honored for early-career achievement
Nina Isoherranen, associate professor of pharmaceutics, will receive the Drug Metabolism Division Early Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

The award recognizes excellent research in drug metabolism and disposition by investigators who have received their doctorate within the last 15 years, according to the society’s website.

Isoherranen studies the metabolism and excretion of drugs, vitamins and hormones. Her work helps prevent harmful drug interactions and addresses the safe use of drugs and vitamins during pregnancy. Her research on vitamin A metabolism, in particular, advances knowledge about certain cancers, fetal development and the body’s ability to fight infections.

She will be honored in Boston at the April annual meeting.